What are the minimum system requirements?
This depends greatly on the type of work you will be using Geneious for, but we recommend at least the following: Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP, MacOS X 10.6 or Linux kernel 2.6. Processor: 64-bit processor. Memory: 2GB or more. Hard-disk: 500MB or more of free space. Video: 1024x768 resolution or higher
What versions of Mac OS does Geneious support?
10.6 Snow Leopard and above, including Mountain Lion
Does Geneious work on 64 bit Windows?
Yes, Geneious supports 64 bit Windows Vista and later.
What versions of Windows does Geneious support?
Windows XP and above, including Windows 8.
Will I lose all my data if I upgrade Geneious
No, your data will automatically be transferred to the new version. We do however suggest that you backup all of your data in Geneious just in case. Use the Back Up button to create a entire archive of your database.
How do I store my data on a USB drive?
You can change where Geneious stores your data by following these steps: 1. Plug in your USB drive, open the drive and create a new folder to put your Geneious data in ("Geneious Data" for example). 2. Start up Geneious and select Tools -> Preferences from the menu. 3. On the General tab, click Browse next to the Data Storage Location option. 4. Navigate to and select the new folder you created on your drive and click the Select button. 5. Click OK and Geneious will ask you if you want to copy your data across, choose what you would like to do then click OK. You are now storing your data on the drive. To access the data from another computer just change the Data Storage Location on the other computer as described above. With recent operating systems such as Windows 7 you may run into ownership/permissions problems with moving the Geneious database around like this.
Do you have a Windows installer (.msi) package for Geneious?
You can download the MSI file from our normal downloads page by checking the ‘Show advanced download options'. Note that the MSIs don't come with Java so you will need to install that separately.
Where should I store my files?
Local Database Geneious stores the user's data in a folder called Geneious X.Y Data (where X.Y is the version of Geneious such as 5.5) which will be located in the user's home directory by default. When you upgrade, Geneious offers to create a copy of this folder (with the upgrade's version number in the name) and update the format.
Geneious databases are not backwards compatible so if you upgraded and haven't accepted the offer to keep a backup you will not be able to downgrade. If you downgrade to an earlier version, you won't be able to see documents you created in the newer version.
Non Standard Locations Users who must access data from multiple places should use:
A USB drive that they can put documents on in .geneious format which can then be dragged into another local database on another machine. In theory you could put your entire local database on the drive but this could result in permissions issues mentioned earlier so isn't recommended Put the .geneious files on DropBox or similar, but definitely not the entire local database. Access a Server Database which will handle the transactions correctly and is the best solution all around to accessing data from multiple sources Storing data on a network drive can lead to very poor performance because Geneious accesses the database frequently. A typical problem would be documents that don't show up in the document table immediately or changes to documents don't persist. Windows Vista and 7 have also had issues where they change ownership of documents when accessed from other machines and this prevents the user from changing them from a different login.
Storing data on a synchronising service is not recommended because the changes to the Geneious database need to be completely copied to the remote service for it to remain intact. Since outgoing connections can be quite slow it is too easy for the sync to be cut short and then when the other computer tries to sync with the remote service the local database is corrupted.
What do I do if I want to share files or the local database?
It isn't unusual to want to share files with other users. Geneious has a simple Jabber client which can do this but users all need to be running Geneious at the same time for the files to be accessed. To get around this we have seen examples where users have shared a single local database. This is a very bad idea as there is no file locking and users can harm each other's data. Permissions on Windows Vista and 7 can also cause unpredictable behaviour such as inability to modify files. The solution is for users to have their own local database and to access shared content via a server database, or to export documents in .geneious format to a shared drive for others to access.
How do I back up the local database?
You should be aware that you need backups. Due to the way the local database works, it is important that Geneious is not accessing the database when a backup is taken. For example, Mac users with Time Machine will have backups taken during the day but if Geneious is running when those backups are taken, they will not be suitable for restoring from and Geneious likely wouldn't start if you did. In that case, backups taken overnight when Geneious isn't running would be fine.
There is a backup button which will cause Geneious to cease working on the local database and make a zip archive. You should use this regularly and the backups should be stored on another drive, or can be left to general system backups safely since these are made when Geneious is in a non-running state. These backups can also be safely moved around including to other machines.
I need to move Geneious to another computer.
It is normal for IT people to move users from one computer to another while having little knowledge of the applications and data that they're moving. Before you hand over your machine, you should make a backup of your data. IT may just use Explorer on Windows to move your files from the old machine to the new one but this will break the Geneious local database because files and paths are longer than the maximum 256 bytes that Explorer handles so files will get lost.
I have two computers, do I have to buy two licenses?
With a personal license you can use one license on up to three computers, provided that no one else uses your license and you do not use your license on more than one computer simultaneously. For example, you may have a computer at work and a computer at home or a Mac and a PC.
If my Geneious license expires will I lose any data?
No, all of your data will still be available.
How do I cite Geneious in a paper?
Information on how to cite Geneious is available on our
citation page. Does Geneious comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act?
Geneious software has not been designed to conflict with any compliance areas of section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act for Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities. We endeavour to make all future development of the Software fully compliant with all areas of Section 508.
Read our full license agreement. Geneious crashed or behaved strangely, what should I do?
If Geneious offers to send an error report to us, please provide as much detail as possible and click Send. Take note of the incident number if you wish to check with us on the status of the problem. If not, contact support@geneious.com or post a message in the Geneious Bugs section of our user forum. Please include any details that may be relevant and your crash.log file if there is one. If the crash involved importing of a file it would be very helpful if you send us the file as well. You can find the crash.log file here: Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Geneious X.Y Data Mac OS: /Users/[User Name]/Geneious X.Y Data Linux: Home Directory/.Geneious X.Y Data
When I search online databases I get an error saying "Please check your connection settings"
This will occur if you dont have a connection to the internet or if you are behind a proxy server.If Geneious is not able to detect your proxy settings automatically (by default), they must be set manually.
To do this: open your default browser (eg. Internet Explorer or Safari) and go to the connection settings. In Internet Explorer these are under Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> Lan Settings... In Safari, Preferences -> Advanced -> Proxies (Change Settings...) In Firefox, Tools -> Options -> Connection Settings If a proxy server or an automatic configuration script are specified here then they must be put into the Geneious preferences also. To do this, select preferences in the Tools menu or click the preferences button at the top of the Geneious window. Set the proxy settings under the general tab to those from your browser.Geneious often says it is running out of memory
If your computer has 1GB of RAM or more, you can allow Geneious to use more by following these steps: Select Tools -> Preferences from the menu in Geneious. Select the General tab Increase the value of Max memory available to Geneious (to 1000 MB for example). Finally, restart Geneious and you shouldn't get these warnings as often.
Some functionality in Geneious (e.g. Dotplot, Primer design, RNA fold) doesn't work under 64bit Linux. I sometimes get an error about a missing binary or file.
A 64 bit installation of Linux needs the 32 bit support libraries installed for some Geneious functionality. The installation process differs across distributions. To install under Ubuntu, run the terminal application and run the command 'sudo apt-get install ia32-libs' to install a base set of 32 bit libraries.
How do I find my lost data?
This can happen when you have upgraded multiple times since you may have had issues finding your data so could have ended up loading older databases. In these cases, data for Geneious 5.5 may actually have been stored in the Geneious 4.8 Data folder for example. The trick is to identify which of potentially multiple local database folders your most recent data was in. Date stamps on the folder should help in this respect.
In Preferences → General tab you can browse to the location of the last local database you accessed and Geneious will switch and import the data that is there.
If you have found your data it is a good idea to use File → Back Up Data... to save the documents in a format that can then be loaded into Geneious again. You may even want to tidy up a bit and delete old data folders if there are lots of them.
Remember: It's always better to make regular backups!
The web links inside Geneious don't work under Linux.
Set your BROWSER environment variable to the name of your browser. The details depend on your browser and type of shell.
For example, if you are using Mozilla and bash, then put export BROWSER=mozilla in your ~/.bashrc file. When using a csh shell variant, put setenv BROWSER mozilla in your ~/.cshrc file.
Why aren't my FASTA files working?
FASTA is simple and ubiquitous. It is also confusing to users and misused. The structure of a FASTA file is like this: >Name Description ATGTCGATGCAT Users often mistake the description for the name, or wonder why their name is truncated when they imported it into Geneious when they have used spaces within what they consider the name. The name must not have spaces and if it does, they should be replaced with something like an underscore to keep the name as a single item. The underscores can always be removed using ‘Batch Rename' once the files have been imported.
I just imported data and the naming is different.
You should try the Edit → Batch Rename... tool which can replace any field with combinations of other fields, new text, and can also perform regular expressions to achieve very complex renaming operations.
Geneious thinks my DNA is protein.
Most often, this happens with FASTA format since it doesn't declare what the data type is. When using drag and drop, Geneious tries to figure out what type of sequence it is looking at and use the correct import. To be certain that you've imported your data as the correct type though, use the File → Import → From File... and choose the format and type from the list. This will avoid embarrassing issues in the case of ambiguous data.
Can I store my sequence data in Word?
No. Word processors will do very odd things to file formats so if users want to use a document format to edit the data they should use a very simple text editor. There are many good choices. Just not Word.